The Truth About Dolly Parton's Difficult Childhood

Dolly Parton's hit single "Coat of Many Colors" might describe Parton in the midst of her impoverished girlhood waxing poetic about the titular multi-colored coat, but it's far more fact than fiction. (The coat is both an allusion to the biblical coat of many colors worn by Joseph from the Jewish and Christian bibles, as well as a straightforward tale from Parton's own childhood, in which a coat her mother stitched out of rags is her most treasured possession.) The song also doesn't even begin to parse the depth of poverty that Parton — the daughter of an industrious menial laborer and an often sickly homemaker — was forced to endure during her formative years.

Some of her most harrowing anecdotes over the years have involved the extreme food insecurity that loomed over the lives of Parton, her parents, and her many siblings. "People hear me talk about eating squirrel and groundhogs, but in the mountains like that, you really didn't have much of a choice," she once said of her childhood in a candid 2003 interview with Rolling Stone magazine. "There were twelve of us kids. We never ate possum — I remember Daddy saying, 'That's like a damn rat.' But we ate everything — turtle, frogs. I just remember the big old groundhogs — whistle pigs, they called them — and you'd cook 'em with sweet potatoes, and you'd have different ways of making some of that gamy taste go away."

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